Break the problem in two. The first part is how to get a remote page. The easiest way is to use LWP::Simple (which you can get from CPAN, or via ActivateState's PPM if you're on Win32). The documentation in that module gives an example. It's only a few lines of code. And, not surprisingly, the function from LWP that you'll use is get().

The second part of the problem is extracting the table. There are a couple of approaches to this, depending on the shape of the table, and what you want to do with the table contents. You might be able to get by with a single regular expression, or you might need something a bit more complicated.

Solve the first part. Then, if you're unable to solve the second, post another message.

If it's the only table on the page, <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial,Helvetica,sans serif">code:</font><HR>

$html =~ m#(<table>.*</table> )#</pre><HR></BLOCKQUOTE> will extract it. Otherwise, you're going to have to figure out how to chip away at the page (divide and conquer) until only what you want is left.

Part of your matching problem may be case dependence. Add an 'i' modifier, to make the match case independent, then try the <title> match again. If you can't make that one work, there's a deeper issue somewhere.

well i tried the i modifier and it wasn't helping unfortunately, and i'm sure $html gets the page because it displayes it. are you sure that *. grabs html too? do you know of an example script that does this?

Let's leave HTML out of this. It's incidental. The problem is that you have a chunk of text in a variable, and you're trying to use a regular expression to extract part of it. What you're extracting happens to be HTML, but so what? Regular expressions don't treat HTML any different from any other text.

It's time to re-read perlre (available on-line via the command perldoc perlre). Since the chunk of text you're dealing with probably has embedded newlines, pay particular attention to the m and s modifiers, and how they influence the meaning of the '.' metacharacter. You will likely have to use one of these modifiers.